


And After

by beaubete



Category: The Hour
Genre: F/M, Infidelity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-17
Updated: 2014-03-17
Packaged: 2018-01-16 01:16:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,568
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1326289
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beaubete/pseuds/beaubete
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hector, a father.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And After

He doesn’t tell her at first.  Doesn’t hold it away, tucked in his pocket for a rainy day, doesn’t savor its warmth later when they’ve been fighting in hushed tones so as not to wake Tobias—Toby—in his crib.  He likes to pretend he’s let it go, despite Toby’s dark hair and clear blue eyes; says he got them from his mummy when he chucks them both under the chin and smiles wide and bland.  It is, after all, his shameful secret and Marnie’s shame should it get out, and she’s covered him enough times.  He kisses her hair fondly and weathers talk of another baby someday, a sister for Toby to play with.

They don’t know about things like family histories, the role they play in health.  It’s not something the doctors really talk about yet, not yet when Toby’s in the parlor playing tag with Susan Lyon around furniture steeped dark with age.  The children shriek with pleasure and he catches Freddie’s eye over Bel and Marnie’s bowed heads.  He tries for “blissfully happy” and lands somewhere afield instead, but Freddie’s eyes dart toward the liquor cabinet and Hector thanks God he can always trust the man to assume the worst about him.  Thanks God they’d assume it’s something he’s done rather than something he is.

And he imagines he could have gone the rest of his life without telling her.  He could have; he’d martyr himself like that—and he holds no illusion that that’s what it is, not when he sees that smarmy face every day when he goes in to work to smile his painted smile and hand over prizes to excitable housewives and their dour husbands; he’s martyring himself, doing penance, serving his term as the bigger man when he knows this man’s cock has been inside his wife, knows this man’s child sleeps in his house.  Which isn’t fair; he loves Toby.  He does.  He only occasionally thinks of him as someone else’s semen splashed on Marnie’s thighs, and the shame of it eats at him every day for weeks after.  Marnie is radiant in a new hat, new gloves, Toby chasing the cat with a new model aeroplane he’ll eventually hang from his ceiling with fishing line with the fleet that smacks Hector in the forehead every time he comes in.

“I love you,” he whispers, and Marnie giggles like a schoolgirl.

He has a reputation for kissing the housewives’ hands.  He’s smooth, is Hector Madden, with empty eyes and a flirty quip and a kiss for all the ladies, whether they’re beautiful or not, and he’d come home after the first time he’d done it to plead forgiveness at Marnie’s knee.  It was for appeal; it made him look nicer, more approachable.  It encouraged the housewives to get giggly and giggly housewives made the game more exciting—housewives wanted to watch a giggly housewive on the television, wanted to see her flutter her hand in his grip and imagine that sly, sideways glance at the camera was for them, _you’re much prettier than she is_ , that look says, _because you’ve watched all the shows, haven’t you?_   He knows that’s what it says because the admen say it does. 

And he flirts with the hostess because he’s supposed to, because the dour husbands aren’t so dour when Nora, then Kitty, then Lola takes the stage, each younger and blonder than the last, pretty and prettier and prettiest.  They want him to flirt with them, he tells Marnie, the admen do.  They want him to flirt with them because while it’s the housewives buying the washing up powder advertised by the show, it’s the husbands paying for it, and the husbands feel like part of a naughty secret when he flirts with them.  They can fantasize—the admen don’t tell him, not explicitly, but it’s not hard to imagine when the sides of their jumpsuits get higher and the waists nip in tighter.  It’s not hard to imagine what those husbands are supposed to be thinking, imagining; it’s every man’s fantasy: a tumbler of scotch in one hand and a pretty girl in the other, leaned against the table in his dressing room that smells of hair oil and pancake makeup—they can fantasize and imagine they’re in on it.

To his surprise, Marnie agrees.  It’s not 1956 anymore, after all—and Toby’s taking Suz out on Friday, so he’ll need the car, though Mr. Lyon’s threatened to find his dad’s old army pistol if Toby even thinks a thought out of line, but Suz laughed and told him to _chill out_ , in that incomprehensible way the children speak now—and she knows he wouldn’t.  He wouldn’t dare.  So he does to spite her, because.

Because it’s emasculating.  Because he can all but feel his cock drawing up, feel it shriveling in and dropping off, because he loves her and he loves Toby and he hates himself so, so very much.  Because he can’t let himself drink and he won’t let himself do more than that, and because a showgirl every now and again is a mostly harmless habit.  Because he’s still Hector Madden despite the grey patch coming in over his left ear, goddammit, and because Hector Madden is a sex symbol.  Hector Madden is a fucking idiot.

It’s Isaac that catches him at it.  Isaac of all people, mousy Isaac writing the drama down the hall who follows him into the dressing room with Marguerite inside already taking off her spangled outfit, Isaac reading him the riot act because after all of it, after _everything_ that’s happened, this is how he repays Marnie?  As if Isaac has any right, but he’s right and Hector sends Marguerite away, zips the back of her suit, and for the first time in a very, very long time considers the liquor cabinet.  It’s only one drink.

The first tell-all catches him by surprise, winding him like a well-aimed punch to the gut, like Bel’s startled and disappointed eyes and Freddie’s smug half-smile.  And Marnie.  They’ve been waiting for him to mess up, he realizes, for years and years, only to find out he had been all along.  He’d always been the man they’d assumed him to be, and hadn’t he fooled them so well pretending to be a decent man?  It is a cold war, Hector at the show and Marnie out making a name for herself as a philanthropist—it sounds so like _philanderer_ that the tabloids always use it; she can’t donate a dime without someone remembering her husband had fucked each and every pretty showgirl who’d come his way, and he wants to break out the old newspapers, to show them the Kiki Delane story and tell them that there’s nothing new under the sun—and Toby off to uni, letters returned with the checks removed.  He thinks about telling, then, because what’s the point of being the martyr without that warm glow of superiority?  He doesn’t.

It’s Izzy that changes everything.  Dizzy Izzy, wittier than Hector could have ever thought about being and twice as pretty as her mother, with her dark curls and her father’s strong nose, Marnie’s delicate jaw.  A late-life blessing, and Hector breaks Freddie’s nose for it, mangles the resemblance.  The damnedest thing about having a best friend is hating him as much as he loves him.  Bel doesn’t know.  Then she has her accident, and she never knows.

And it’s Dizzy Izzy, who’s somehow more Lix Storm than any of her four parents, who talks to him now that the show’s off the air, and it’s Dizzy Izzy who’s researching old clubs like El Paradis.  She’s got an office where she does research for lost things, and he finds himself talking, at last, about Mum and the damage he’d done when he was young and stupid.  They’re talking about showgirls, about the scandal in ’57 and Uncle Freddie’s part in it—and Hector thanks God that his own is just another face in the papers, another nameless john in the crowd—and he finds.  It’s all.  The story pours out from the beginning, spilling faster than Izzy knows quite what to do with it; she makes him stop, gets her tape recorder, then has him go back, and when it’s all done, they sit together.

Marnie’s death—and Hector knows he’s getting old because he’s telling this all out of order now—came as a shock, somehow surprising that she should be old, or more accurately that he could outlive her.  Toby comes home, kisses his sister, and ignores him, but Izzy presses a manuscript into his hands and begs him to promise to read it.  A few months later, they officially close down the Lime Grove—not-so-affectionately dubbed _Slime Grove_ these days, and with that gone, it’s as if what’s left of them truly fades.  Freddie’s been gone—and how did he forget that?  How did he forget he’s alone now?—long years, something to do with the packs of cigarettes they’d all smoked back then.  He’s a relic, is Hector.  He feels decrepit. 

And Izzy presses her book into his hands, a wry smile on her face.  He opens the front page— _The Hour We Almost Missed_ —to the dedication and blinks, eyes filmed with tears.

“Of _course_ you’re my Daddy, she says fiercely, and that’s all there is to it.


End file.
